Greek Testaments and German scholars (with a few smells and bells thrown in)

A copy of the seventh edition (1874) of Alford's Greek Testament, rather handsomely bound in full leather with the arms of Christ Church gilt-stamped on both front and back boards (although the binding hasn't lasted too well; several of the boards are loose and the spines are crumbling).

Henry Alford was vicar of Wymeswold, in Leicestershire, from 1835 to 1853 (where he had the church comprehensively restored by A. N. W. Pugin), then moved to London, to the Quebec Chapel.

This is where I go off at a tangent, yet again ... Why the Quebec Chapel? Was there a community of Canadians around there? And if so, wouldn't they have been French Canadians, so why would they have had a chapel presided over by an Anglican minister?

I am (as so often) barking up entirely the wrong tree. Quebec Chapel was a chapel-of-ease to the church of St Marylebone, and so called because it stood in Quebec Street, which was named to commemorate the capture of Quebec by General Wolfe in 1759. The chapel itself was described by Edward Walford in Old and New London as 'a square, ugly edifice ... with no pretensions to ecclesiastical fitness'; it was replaced in 1911 by a building designed by Sir Walter Tapper in all the splendour of Edwardian Gothic, and is now, as the Church of the Annunciation, Marble Arch, a parish church in its own right, and determinedly Anglo-Catholic with full smells and bells. I wonder what Henry Alford, who, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'ably defended evangelicalism against ritualism', would have thought ...

Which brings me back to the Revd Mr Alford. In 1857 he was appointed Dean of Canterbury, in which post he continued until his death in 1871. He was a man of many talents, whose poetry was well-regarded and whose hymns (including the harvest hymn 'Come, ye thankful people, come') are still sung; he also (from the ODNB again) 'composed piano, organ, and vocal music, sang and played, carved in wood, painted in watercolours, and published a book on the Riviera'. He was also a distinguished biblical scholar who recognized the importance of the work being done by contemporary German theologians; his pioneering edition of the New Testament was based on the texts established by German scholars and included detailed and comprehensive linguistic notes - quite unlike previous English-language commentaries, which had been overwhelmingly homiletical.

And how does Somerville come to have a set of volumes on which the arms of Christ Church feature prominently? There are no inscriptions or bookplates of previous owners, or indications that they were a gift to Somerville - the only clue to their history is a pencilled note inside the first volume saying '4 vols 6/6/-'. So I conclude that they were bought by a Christ Church man, who had them rebound in a fine leather binding displaying his college's arms, but then he (or his heirs) sold them.